Creating a booklet

[iSaint]

I have MS Word '04, and I have created a service book for our church Youth Sunday tomorrow. I've done this several times over the years, and then spend the next hour trying to put the pages in order so it will print then copy as a front and back folding booklet.

My question is, is there a program - or a layout trick - that will do this for me?

Let me know if you aren't clear on what I'm trying to do.

thanks

[Blue Velvet]

I could be wrong, but it sounds like the process that you are trying to achieve manually is known as 'imposition'.

If you pick up a magazine or wire-bound (stapled) booklet, you will see that page 1 is printed on the same leaf as the back page.

A few years ago, designers in DTP always had to worry about producing artwork in 'designer's pairs' and 'printer's pairs'. The 'designer's pairs' were the artwork, the spread as you'd see them in the finished bound work. The 'printer's pairs' were how the pages are actually printed before being trimmed, folded and bound.

If I send a publication to print, I usually send a laser print of the pages as a loosely-bound hard copy. To do this, I have to do what is called 'knocking-up' i.e. flipping each alternate page and stacking it on the pile before punching and binding the completed result.

I'm not sure whether you can achieve the same result without a pretty advanced office laser printer that can print duplex (both sides) in one run.

[Blue Velvet]

Of course, you could always try printing odd number pages only, then flipping the pages and putting them back in the carrier and printing even-numbered pages on the reverse sides... all told, it's all a bit clumsy and fussy.

How many pages in your booklet?

[snkTab]

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure you can just bring the file (in page order) to kinkos or whatever and they can do it for you.

[iSaint]

Originally Posted by Blue Velvet

Of course, you could always try printing odd number pages only, then flipping the pages and putting them back in the carrier and printing even-numbered pages on the reverse sides... all told, it's all a bit clumsy and fussy.

How many pages in your booklet?

Right now it's set up in landscape with two pages on each sheet - and it's 12 sheets altogether.

re: Kinko's - we're a small (read: poor) church, so I'm not really spending any money on this outside our own copier costs.

[Blue Velvet]

So that's 24 pages, right?

The problem is that Word on its own is inadequate when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Here's a diagram to give you an idea how it should be laid out.
The bracketed spreads show the front & back of each leaf.

p.s. This excludes the cover.

[JDar]

There is a freeware application called Cocoa Booklet which prints booklets from pdf files. It's fairly straightforward to set up and use. Can't beat the rhythm of Blue Velvet's direct approach, though.